We are naturally inclined to treat pains (and sensations, and feelings in general) as private objects “in” the soul. This talk is confused, because we don’t really have a logical mechanism in which the pain could really function as an object. No conceptual scheme to support this. For example, we don’t have anywhere in which to place the pain. If pain were an object, this should have been possible; and since it is not possible, it logically undermines the idea that pains are objects: it shows (at least one part of) the nonsensicality of this idea. However, even after realizing this, we don’t give up. We talk of pain being in the body—in my toe, for example, after I stubbed it against the table. But the pain is not “in the toe” in the same way that there is blood in the toe. So where is it, then? We try to outsmart ourselves: We talk of pains as being “in” the brain. But it is not my brain that feels pain, but me (in the toe). —

Pains are soul-ly. They are not part of the matter of us, they are part of our form—our soul—and so they refuse to be contained in our brain. Pain is not “in the body”; rather, pain is a certain kind of life the body may have. For instance, pain is the meaning of some behavior; it is not something that is there in addition to behavior.

Learning (remembering) to think about pain as a form of embodiment can have a remarkable relaxing effect on the philosopher-of-mind’s mind-muscles. It shows us where to look, it soothes the relevant thought-cramps. It is the kind of thing that shows the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. And I’m not saying it is easy to learn this: For one thing, pain is more obviously the form of some behavior than it is the form of embodiment of someone who keeps perfectly quiet and still. There are also difficulties connected to the differences between the ways in which this form of embodiment feels from a first-person and from a third-person perspective.

Now, even if we can learn to see pain as a form of embodiment, it will not completely eradicate the natural inclination to treat pains (and sensations, and feeling, and experiences in general) as objects; what could? What it does to that inclination is allow us to put it in perspective; it allows us to rethink this inclination, to put it in its proper place. In particular it allows us to put the inclination to treat pains and sensations as mental objects alongside the idea of them as forms of certain actions, behaviors, dispositions, and so on: to view the idea and the inclination in light of each other, and explore the relations between them.

More needs to be said both about the idea and about the inclination. But I’m now more interested in the inclination. The inclination to treat pains and sensations as objects is not just an inclination; it is a justified inclination—even if the justification is of no ordinary type. It is an inclination that is shared by all of us, despite contrasting grammatical commitments, and the reason why it is shared is that it captures the face—the aspect—that pains and sensations have for us.

Sensations and pains feel as if they have an independent existence: they seem like detachable pieces of our mind. Some thoughts that force themselves on us are like that too. We can have relations with them: entertain them, ignore them, be surprised by them, reject them, suspect them, endorse them, and so on. We want to capture a distinction between them and us—between our representations and the “I think” that always accompanies them. Perhaps even, sometimes, we don’t like the fact that the kind of existence these sensations and pains have is in us, through us: that they materialize through us, that they wear us like clothes. – This whole discussion can be taken as a partial answer to the hard problem of consciousness—at least when the problem is formulated in this way: ‘How can pains be objects, when they don’t have the grammar of objects?’

Now, if pains and sensations are truly forms of embodiment, if it is confused to think of them as objects “in” our soul, why do we still have such a strong inclination to think that? – A partial answer might be this: Perhaps this is the face that pains and sensations sometimes have for us, at least partly because, and to the extent that, we have them despite ourselves. We are passive with regard to our sensations; we are not their agents. We don’t sense or feel pain at will. And yet we enact them. We embody them. Perhaps this is why—this is how—it can become strange that they can be the form of our actions and dispositions: It makes it possible for us to get ourselves into a mindset from which this seems genuinely surprising: “How can something be the form of my behavior (pain behavior) while I’m passive with regard to it?”

Some questions:

1. Is the inclination to see pains and sensations as detachable objects a manifestation of the inclination we have sometimes to experience the limits of language as limitations, or might it sometimes be? By maintaining this inclination, are we expressing dissatisfaction with the very conditions that make it possible for us to make pains intelligible for ourselves in the first place?

2. Relatedly, is the inclination surmountable? Do we only experience it when we are in a philosophical mood—is it perhaps so by definition?

3. To the extent that the inclination to regard pains and sensations as objects is justified, does this tell us what pains and sensations are? Or does it merely reveal our attitude towards them? Is the description I gave of the attitude we have to pains, as reflected by the inclination to treat them as objects, is it correct only to the extent that it strikes a chord?

4. Might the idea of pain as a form of behavior, a form of embodiment more generally, although different from the inclination to see pains as objects, yet nourish from it? (Might this be part of the truth of the inclination somehow?) Are there elements of this form of embodiment—primarily perhaps the elements related to pain being forced on us—that not only give rise to the inclination to see pains as objects, but which cannot be accounted for except by employing the language of objects?

5. Two questions in connection with self-knowledge:

a. Is it part of what we need to do if we are to obey the Delphic imperative to know ourselves: to own our mental life, to accept it—not as ours, but as us? That is, are we to accept our pains and sensations and thoughts and wishes and knowledge and so on as the forms of our actions and dispositions and so on, and not as something we have relations with?

b. Is it another part of the task to accept that the principles of some of what we do, disposed to do, intend to do, and so on, are forced on us—that we are constantly forced to enact things despite ourselves?

There seem to be a contrast between two ways of viewing the world. I can formulate the contrast as a contrast—at least an apparent one—between Wittgenstein’s later and earlier philosophy.

In the later philosophy, Wittgenstein seems to be accepting a robust, perhaps it deserves the name “Aristotelian,” notion of objectivity. The world is not only a collection of the dry objects of modern science—things that can apparently be specified and accounted for without mentioning, and in abstraction from, the ways in which they are taken up and weaved into a network of practice and interest. Such a world is an illusion, according to this latter Wittgensteinian view. This comes out in the fact that there is no way of accounting for such a world, or even entertaining thoughts about it. There is no ‘it’; we don’t have any ‘it’ in mind. For we have deprived ourselves of the possibility of having any such idea in mind by severing its connections to any network of practice and interest; and we have thus undermined the possibility of any such idea of ever having any substance. For an object to be what it is just is for it to be the kind of thing that is taken up and weaved into certain networks of practice and interest. For an object to have an identity is for it to have a form (in the Aristotelian sense, where form is distinguished from matter); and for something to have a form is for it to be intelligible—to be permeated by logos, to have a place in a network of practice and interest. And thus, logically there is no such thing as an object—being what it is—apart from its being intelligible. What it is is visible in how—all myriad of ways—it is taken up into our life (perhaps theoretical life, but also practical life) with it.

As opposed to that, in the early philosophy, in the Tractatus and the Lecture on Ethics for instance, Wittgenstein seems to be making a distinction—I want to call it “Platonist”—between the world as it appears from a moral standpoint, and the world of “facts, fact, and facts but no Ethics.” This can seem to be the world that in his later philosophy he thought was an illusion: world without soul, world without room for any real meaning, world without room for any value that really has value. Or at least, it seems, although this world may be able to accommodate many sorts of logos, many forms, it cannot accommodate the ethical. Ethics, in this view, is not another form; it is not a language game or a family of such games. Ethics is not containable in any network of practice and interest. Moral value is absolute, and ethics is otherworldly. Trying to push ethics into the world destroys ethics; or rather, if we could do such a thing, the world would explode.

Both points are valuable, and worth preserving. But it is hard to hold on to both—the Aristotelian and the Platonist views—to be impressed by both intuitions in a way that does not make one come at the expense of the other. It is easy to be impressed by the latter Wittgensteinian point, and rejoice when we find in this notion of form, or in this wider conception of objectivity, all the philosophical resources that we need in order to repopulate the world, and account for its richness and abundance of meaning and significance: “There is more in heaven and earth than science can see—not only atoms, but ordinary objects too; not only movements, but actions too; not only chains of causes and events, but stories and adventures too. Room,” we trust, “will also be found for ethics. Facts fact and facts, and ethics too!” It is also easy to be impressed by the early Wittgensteinian point and adopt a cold attitude towards all this variety—or rather an attitude of suspension and silence, which finds all that richness unsatisfying, and always strives, waits, for something higher.

Didactically, a problematic strategy of explaining the Wittgensteinian position with regard to the relation between pain and pain-behavior is to begin with being skeptical of the possibility of having pain sensation without any outward signs. The problem with this is that if you then try to say that the outward signs are a criterion for pain, not a mere symptom, you will be too late. For the connection between pain and pain behavior already looks external.

A better way to go is to first mention the internal connection between pain and having a body. For although pain without behavior sounds like something that makes perfect sense, pain without a body is a puzzling idea. The connection looks internal. The idea is that thinking about being embodied cannot be completely severed from the forms which this embodiment takes—pain being one of them, movement being another, behavior being yet another.

At bottom, pain is the form (in the Aristotelian sense) of certain types of behavior (and not, for instance, the form of a certain kind of movement), and to explain the Wittgensteinian view requires making forms visible, or, what comes to the same thing, showing, getting people to see, the symbols in the sings.

The fact that we have two words: ethics and morality is a treasure for philosophers. Hegel, Nietzsche, Bernard Williams, and others make use of this fact. And almost every distinction philosophers make using this fact is deep and important: almost every such distinction unfolds a LOGICAL difference between ways of caring about things. These distinctions have a tendency to reveal—against expectation—that the relevant phenomena do not form a unity in any simple way: that we have more than one form of judgment in morality, in ethics. They allow us to see one type of moral responsiveness to the world in light of another, and thereby expose dimensions we would not be aware of otherwise.

But I want to mention one danger related to making use of the fact that we have two words: ethics and morality. The problem is that we only have two words. We got one from Latin, and the other from Greek. But if I were to estimate, I would say that all the different relevant terms in all the different languages in the world will probably not be enough to captures all aspects of the phenomena we are interested in—all the distinctions we need to make, all the dimensions we care to be responsive to. Making a certain distinction (a single distinction) between two subject matters, or two methods for thinking about questions, or two types of attitude toward things, fixes our attention on one dimension, and may hide others from view.

It would probably be best to talk of morality/ethics as we talk of games: to refer to the different phenomena here—fuzzy boundaries, as they might have—using the different terms as synonyms, but without pretending that the phenomena must be unified in one way or another. That is, it would be best to look and see if there are differences. At any rate, this would be better than just assuming that the differences HAVE to take certain forms.

A man is wolfing a dripping luscious lunch. Nearby there is a hungry man. The eating man enjoys himself. He comments about the food. He makes jokes—about the food, about his good fortune, about his saliva, about his manners, about his labored breath.

Laughing, while an injured person is nearby, may naturally be felt as an insult by the injured. This, even though the laughter may not be meant to be ill-intentioned. This is true whether the injury is like hunger, or some human weakness, or social weakness.

Is the laughter an injury? Does the injured man have cause for complaint?

The question is about the meaning of our actions. This may not be clear, and possibly may not even be fully determined. – That is, the dynamics I’m describing may be part of the dynamics through which the meaning of certain actions is determined. It is meant to reveal part of the social (as opposed to private) nature of such determination.

The laughing man may want to resist. He may want to insist on the ownership of his own actions. He may say: “I did not intend to insult, but to laugh.” The injured man may want to say: “this is not a laughing matter”; Meaning: there is no (logical) space for laughing here. Whatever you do here will not be laughing (just as whatever you do to a chair may not be insulting it). – A tension between sense of humor and moral sensibility; or between lack of sense of humor and lack of moral sensibility.

What you do may come apart from what you mean to do—may attain meaning beyond what you expected. You may need to chase what you do sometimes.

In any case, blame and praise are naturally accorded for what you do, not for what you mean to do. The coming apart of what you do from what you mean to do is a kind of lack of self-knowledge. Knowing yourself is, partly, the ability to possess your own actions—to do what you mean. And insofar as what we do can come apart from what we mean to do, we may be blamed for lack of self-knowledge.

Follow-up: Intentions and consequences

Intentions come before the action and consequences come after. But the “before” and the “after” here indicate different kinds of spaces: consequences are never part of the action; they are by definition external. Intentions are by definition internal. And this is indicated by the fact that when intention and action come apart, we are in limbo with regard to the action: The action is not an action in the full sense of the term; questions about the concept action open.

Last night I read a passage from John Coetzee’s ‘Diary of a Bad Year,’ which prompted me to formulate a thought I had about the relations between self-examination and first person authority. The idea in a nutshell is that the point of self-examination is to establish, or re-establish, first person authority. I thought also that this connection between self-examination and first person authority may form the beginning of a bridge between the discussion here and the discussions about self-knowledge in the philosophy of mind literature (not that I project that many will want to cross that bridge).

Anyway, Coetzee tells about a newspaper advertisement, where an American lawyer, an expert on legal liability, offers, for a fee of $650 an hour, to “coach Australian companies in how to word apologies without admitting liability.”

Coetzee comments (p. 109):

“First Adam Smith placed reason in the service of interest; now sentiment is placed in the service of interest too. In the course of this latter development, the concept of sincerity is gutted of all meaning. In the present “culture,” few care to distinguish—indeed, few are capable of distinguishing—between sincerity and the performance of sincerity, just as few distinguish between religious faith and religious observance. To the dubious question, Is this true faith? or, Is this true sincerity? one receives only a blank look. Truth? What is that? Sincerity? Of course I’m sincere—didn’t I say so?

“The expensive American coaches his clients neither in how to perform true (sincere) apologies nor in how to perform false (insincere) apologies that will have the look of true (sincere) apologies, but simply in how to perform apologies that will not open them to being sued. In his eyes and in the eyes of his clients, an unscripted, unrehearsed apology will likely be an excessive, inappropriate, ill-calculated, and therefore false apology, that is to say, one that costs money, money being the measure of all things.

“Jonathan Swift, thou shouldst be living at this hour.”

One thing Coetzee seems to me to be after here is the sense in which we may lose not only the ability to say whether others are sincere, but also deprive ourselves of the possibility of being sincere. And this, not just by overlooking the reasons for being sincere in a particular case, but crucially by succumbing to a temptation to see things from a perspective where the point of being sincere or insincere in general is lost on us. – The question does not make sense to us anymore. We lose the ability to be interested in things in that general way; we lose the concept.

Now, perhaps this only happens in extreme cases, and perhaps the sense of the importance of sincerity and truthfulness can be easily revived in most—I’m not sure. But I’m concerned with something else: with the relation of all that to first person authority. Whether we are sincere or not—about whether we are in pain, or in love, or whether we are truly sorry for what we have done—is normally a matter regarding which we have first person authority. And typically, first person authority is, and is taken to be, a given: something that cannot be taken away from us. But if Coetzee’s implied phenomenology is right, then we may, at least in some cases and at least in part, lose our first person authority: we may fall into such a condition where we cannot tell—indeed do not even know how to ask the question—about what we feel, or think, or want. And Coetzee’s case is indeed extreme. There are other cases in which we don’t quite know what we want, or think, or feel, or how to make decisions about all that. It is quite common actually: Is this true love? Is this the right career from me? Is my prayer sincere?

Not having first person authority, I take it, does not mean that someone else has the authority. I cannot—conceptually—have first person authority over your thoughts, feelings, or desires. Rather, not having first person authority means that no one has the authority, and in a sense there is no one to have it: It is a kind of absence of self. I’m not sure how to describe this condition. Can this be described in Kierkegaardian terms as absence of subjective existence (for having lost it, or not yet established it), or as ability to exist only objectively (perhaps willingly assuming such existence, or not being capable yet of anything else)?

In any case, if Coetzee is right and it is not a matter of course that we have first person authority, then it also seems to me that it is not easy to establish such authority either. Even if we have it, first person authority is not something we always have once and for all, or something that we are guaranteed to have. Rather, it is something we need to work at establishing and maintaining; and one way in which we establish it is by acquiring concepts: by learning to be interested in things in particular ways—e.g. in religion beyond observance, and sincerity beyond performance of sincerity. Can we call that self-examination?

Prompted by a discussion in Kelly Jolley's Blog, and by some comments Ed Mooney made, I want to suggest a distinction between two notions (two uses) of “self-knowledge”:

(1) Self-knowledge as a secondary sense of knowledge.

(2) Self-knowledge as a promissory sense of knowledge. (I take the term “promissory” from Cora Diamond’s papers on Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle.)

Both senses involve conceptual, logical, difficulties, and are thus different from the matter-of-course sense of self-knowledge—the sense in which I can know my own height, or blood-pressure.

(1) “Self-knowledge” is used as a secondary sense of “knowledge” when the paradoxes that characterize it are not taken to be resolvable—perhaps resolvable in the old language game, or in any new one.

Here are two of those paradoxes: a) To successfully get to know ourselves is, among other things, to establish our own agency. But since self-examination is an exercise of agency, there is something baffling about the possibility of such an activity: an activity which is aimed at establishing for the first time something that is a precondition for its exercise. b) There is a (related) paradox that can be formulated explicitly about an activity that is supposed to be both a kind of creation and a kind of discovery: For there to be discovery, what we discover must already exist; for there to be creation, what we create must not already exist. The use of this term—“self-knowledge”—is logically problematic, and yet, when used in this way, it is not as if we have a better term. ‘We need this term here.’ And the similarity between this and Wittgenstein’s saying that he needs the word “fat” to describe Wednesday relative to Thursday does not seem to me to be a coincidence.

(2) “Self-knowledge” is used as a promissory sense of “knowledge” when the paradoxes that characterize it are taken to be resolvable on a higher level, in a different (although perhaps related) language game which we do not yet have—or do not yet fully have.

We use promissory language elsewhere. We do this for instance in mathematics, when talking of “the next prime after 37 in the series of prime numbers”: Even though we have a strong sense that there must be such a series, we don’t have it; we only have a promise of one. Therefore we don’t have what it takes to refer to the series, and all our references to “it” rely on our sense that there has to be one, and the promise that there is. Likewise, when we talk of self-knowledge in this sense, the implication is that we may intentionally examine ourselves only to an extent: we may only act under the guidance of a promise that we are really doing something—a sense that we must be. Whether we are or not, while we are engaged in this would-be self-examination, remains to be seen. It may turn out, if things go right, that we have been doing something after all. And if it does, this means that we have thereby discovered a new language game—established a new stretch of grammar, a conceptual scheme for a new use of the term “knowledge.”

The reason why I suggest this distinction is that it seems to me that both kinds of uses are important, and both capture things that we care about. In particular, both capture something of the fact that when engaged in self-examination, we are not in full possession of the activity: We are building something, or we are relying on something, which we are not guaranteed to have (perhaps partly on others’ willingness to share the sense that the whole business is worthwhile), but all the while we are exposing ourselves. And in both cases the value of the self-examination goes hand in hand with this exposure: the exposure is what makes the examination humble, as it were. In religious terms, this exposure reveals our dependency on something like divine grace in the very use of our words. Nevertheless, the two uses of “self-knowledge” indicate two different types of actions, and two different ways in which we may be exposed. And this shows a possible ambiguity in our talk of self-knowledge.

Let me say and emphasize that I do not want to claim that if we are to self-examine, we have only the two options I mentioned, or even that these two options are mutually exclusive. Neither seems to me to capture in full all that we want to identify in the grammar of self-examination. Relative to that complicated activity, the two kinds of self-examination I distinguished have, I think, simpler grammar—perhaps more unified grammar. My hope is that they can be useful as objects of comparison. They are not meant to draw attention to themselves, but to help shed some light on the very complicated activity of self-examination.

To successfully self-examine is, among other things, to establish our own agency. But since self-examination is an exercise of agency, there is something baffling about the possibility of such an activity: an activity which is aimed at establishing for the first time something that is a precondition for its exercise. Self-examination involves a kind of bootstrapping.

One thing that characterizes agency is the ability to act intentionally, as opposed to having things happen to you. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the difficulty about the constitution of agency is reflected in a puzzle about the intentionality of self-examination.

On the one hand, to self-examine is to perform an action—or better, to engage in an activity—intentionally. It cannot just be something that happened to us while we were not paying attention—at least not in the sense that our blood-pressure may drop without us noticing. For there to be self-examination in the first place, someone has to be the agent of the examination. In this sense, we have to be a party to what is going on. However, on the other hand, the intentionality of self-examination is of a special kind. To self-examine is not something we can simply perform as we would an action like shutting our eyelids. We cannot just obey the order: “Examine yourself!” (“Know thyself!”). Obeying this order necessarily involves figuring out first what it would take to obey it, and essentially this is not given.

The problem of intending to engage in self-examination may be compared to the problem of talking of the next prime after 37 in the series of prime numbers: Even though we have a strong sense that there must be such a series, we don’t have it; we only have a promise of one. Therefore we don’t have what it takes to refer to the series, and all our references to “it” rely on our sense that there has to be one, and the promise that there is. Likewise, we may intentionally examine ourselves only to an extent: we may only act under the guidance of a promise that we are really doing something—a sense that we must be. Whether we are or not is, while we are engaged in this would-be self-examination, remains to be seen.

We may also come to realize that we are self-examining. That is, the fact that there is a riddle about ourselves in the first place may be revealed to us for the first time when the riddle begins to be solved. This is the sense in which self-examination may happen to us while we don’t notice. In this sense self-examination is an activity of which we may discover ourselves to be the agent.